Ryan Ripley . Com

A few days ago, Bruce Tate wrote about the popularity of Ruby on Rails in a post he called, “Popular vs. Great“. In this excellent post, Bruce tries to break perceptions behind framework adoption, and helps provide road signs to look for to see if one framework will “cross the chasm”.

However, I think that Bruce has missed a crucial point. The story that each framework is trying to tell is more important than the framework itself. If you take a look at Ruby on Rails, it is selling a story about productivity. Check out their quotes page to see this in action:

“Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months
to develop can be produced in a matter of days.�
-Tim O’Reilly, Founder of O’Reilly Media

“What sets this framework apart from all of the others is the preference for convention over configuration making applications easier to develop and understand.�
-Sam Ruby, ASF board of directors

These are just 2 examples of many choice quotes from industry leaders furthering the productivity story.

The story does not stop there. One of the first video’s showing the power of Rails was a 15 minute demo showing how to created a fully functional blog application. 15 minutes, and 58 lines of code! This is quite a powerful story, and the Rails site tells it wonderfully.

But this is just one quarter of the equation. Not only must the story be powerful, it must be viral. It must spread as quickly as possible to as many people as possible to really take off. David Geary noted the infection in effect in his blog when he posted on a Rails/AJAX demonstration that he gave:

My third demo put Rails’ Active Record through it’s paces. I made half a dozen live code changes, adding columns to tables, changing the schema, doing a 1 to many relationship, etc., and after each code change, I refreshed the browser. Five or six live code changes in rapid-fire succession followed by browser refreshes that accurately reflected the database changes. Near the end of that demo, I looked into the audience and saw something that I’d never seen at a NFJS symposium: a woman sitting at a table near the front of the room was looking at me with her mouth wide open and the most incredulous look on her face. It was almost like I could read her mind: “This can’t be real!”, she must’ve been thinking. I pointed at her and said “That’s pretty amazing, huh?” She nodded a reply, but the look of astonishment never left her face.

The third requirement is Timing. One could grossly over-generalize the current IT maket as one that runs lean. Not a lot of help and a lot of work to do to “increase share-holder value”. In this kind of atmosphere, the story of applications that can be written 10x’s faster is very appealing. It’s almost as if the audience was waiting for someone to come along and tell this story!

Finally, to round out our discussion well look at authenticity. That’s right, the story must be authentic to be successful. The Rails site makes it easy to believe this story with all of the quotes and videos, and a listing of applications currently running on rails. There is also a weblog, wiki, IRC channel (#rubyonrails channel on irc.freenode.net), and mailing list to make the Rails story authentic to others by helping adopters of the language not fail.

So there you have it: strong story, timing, going viral, and being authentic. I truly believe that if you are missing just one of these factors, having the greatest framework or in general any product, will not help you.

This has just been a brief discussion on some very complex marketing topics. For more (better) information, I highly recomment the following books by Seth Godin, who goes into these topics in much more detail:

In my next post we’ll take a look at some of the other frameworks that Bruce mentioned: Spring, Hibernate, Rife, EJB 2.0/3.0 and see where some of them hit the mark, while others bombed badly.